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Gardening tips: four ways to beat the freeze

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1. Seed potatoes are traditionally planted on Good Friday, but many gardeners have delayed. If the ground is frozen, try planting in containers instead. Two or three early tubers such as Rocket or Red Duke of York placed in a large builder’s bucket or plastic bin (drill holes in the bottom for drainage) will produce a good crop of spuds, and they’re less vulnerable to slugs, too. Cover the container with horticultural fleece or place in a frost-free shed until the weather warms. If your soil isn’t frozen, do plant outside but protect the rows with several layers of fleece.

2. Throw fleece over newly emerged shoots of herbaceous perennials in exposed spots in the garden to shield them from freezing winds. Fleece will also protect open flowers and buds of delicate fruit trees such as apricots and cherries. Mulches can help to preserve moisture in the soil and suppress weeds, but if applied when the soil is frozen they will simply lock in the cold for longer, so wait for a thaw. If you must get on with something in the garden, prune gooseberries and autumn-fruiting raspberries and tie in blackberry canes.

3. Most vegetable seeds need a consistent soil temperature of 6-8C before they can be sown direct: peg down black plastic sheeting over bare soil to warm it ready for sowing and planting. In the meantime, sow seeds of parsley, cabbages and lettuces in plastic module trays and place them on a warm, sunny windowsill, with a clear plastic bag or clingfilm over the trays to trap in heat. Once the weather warms and you can see roots poking through the drainage holes, harden seedlings off by gradually exposing them to conditions outside. Plant out once you’re comfortable working without a coat.

4. Microgreens are the ultimate quick-return windowsill crop. Try sowing coriander, radish, chard, fenugreek and mustard seeds in a plastic takeaway food tray or a length of guttering and covering with a sprinkle of compost or vermiculite. Keep the compost moist and within days you’ll be cutting handfuls of flavoursome greens to sprinkle on stir-fries, dahls and salads.

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Donna Stiles: Tips on composting and fishy garden solutions – Record

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I’ve received some emails from readers asking about composting, so I thought I’d share a few hints about that. Keep those emails coming!

1. You know the lint you throw away every time you use your dryer? Instead of throwing it away, try burying it around your flower and vegetable gardens. It will help your soil retain moisture. Don’t have time to bury it? Just throw it in your compost pile. It still has the same effect.

2. You know that wonderful chore of having to clean out the fish tank (yuck). Make it a little less painful by making something positive of it. Your fish might be done with the water, but it is full of nutrients your plants, flowers and vegetables will love.

3. Talking about fishy solutions, a simple liquid fertilizer that works great for annuals, perennials, vegetables and even house plants is fish emulsion. Make sure you dilute it with water before applying it. You can use it every two to three weeks to help all your plants grow. You can find fish emulsion at your local nursery or garden center.

4. Revive soil with vacuum cleaner bags. After the vacuum cleaner sucks up the dust from your home, let your garden do the rest. Empty the bag in your garden and work in the soil or add to your compost pile. The lint and dust will break down and enrich the soil.

5. Making a compost pile is really easy and we should all have one. You can throw almost anything that is natural and biodegradable. All you need is a place to keep it and the materials to build one. You can use old trash cans, chicken wire, old wood — anything you can cover and keep dark. Once built, be sure to water it down and stir it around until it is ready to use.

Donna Stiles is owner of Donna’s Dam Seeds in Shasta Lake. She can be reached at donnasdamseeds@att.net.

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Donna Stiles: Tips on composting and fishy garden solutions – Record

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I’ve received some emails from readers asking about composting, so I thought I’d share a few hints about that. Keep those emails coming!

1. You know the lint you throw away every time you use your dryer? Instead of throwing it away, try burying it around your flower and vegetable gardens. It will help your soil retain moisture. Don’t have time to bury it? Just throw it in your compost pile. It still has the same effect.

2. You know that wonderful chore of having to clean out the fish tank (yuck). Make it a little less painful by making something positive of it. Your fish might be done with the water, but it is full of nutrients your plants, flowers and vegetables will love.

3. Talking about fishy solutions, a simple liquid fertilizer that works great for annuals, perennials, vegetables and even house plants is fish emulsion. Make sure you dilute it with water before applying it. You can use it every two to three weeks to help all your plants grow. You can find fish emulsion at your local nursery or garden center.

4. Revive soil with vacuum cleaner bags. After the vacuum cleaner sucks up the dust from your home, let your garden do the rest. Empty the bag in your garden and work in the soil or add to your compost pile. The lint and dust will break down and enrich the soil.

5. Making a compost pile is really easy and we should all have one. You can throw almost anything that is natural and biodegradable. All you need is a place to keep it and the materials to build one. You can use old trash cans, chicken wire, old wood — anything you can cover and keep dark. Once built, be sure to water it down and stir it around until it is ready to use.

Donna Stiles is owner of Donna’s Dam Seeds in Shasta Lake. She can be reached at donnasdamseeds@att.net.

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Cobb Workshop to Provide Gardening, Canning Tips

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UGA Cobb Cooperative Extension will host “From Your Garden to Your Table” 6:30-8:30 p.m., Tuesday, April 2, at Cobb Extension Office, 678 South Cobb Drive, Suite 200, Marietta.

Gardening tips, such as site selection, garden planning, soil testing, soil preparation, mulching and maintenance, vegetable culture and common diseases and insects will be provided.

Canning tips, such as an overview of canning equipment, food safety, pressure canning, water bath canning and freezing will be covered. Light refreshments will be provided. There will be a $10 fee at the door.

Pre-registration is required by calling 770-528-4070.

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Grow. Eat. Authors share organic vegetable gardening tips for Florida – Daytona Beach News

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It’s time to tackle your spring garden using tips from the recently published “Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida.”

Authors Ginny Stibolt, a botanist and lifelong gardener, and Melissa Contreras, a master gardener in Miami-Dade County, came together to write this in-depth book as food prices rise and people need affordable produce.

Whether you have a front porch rail for a hanging pot, a windowsill for a window box, a stoop for a potted plant, a spot out back where you can set a bale of hay or acres for plowing or just a sunny window, you’ll find a method in the book for growing your edible garden.

As in growing anything, you’ll need space, light, water and soil. Stibolt and Contreras go into great detail about where and how to plant your veggies for maximum results, with emphasis on organic basics.

Build your soil, kill bugs, mulch to suppress weeds, start a compost pile — all the facts are there for the novice or pro.

Get down to planting your seeds and seedlings and watch them grow with techniques outlined in the book. And if you want to get into seedless, or asexual, crop propagation, that too is all in the book — or you can skip some of the technical details of composting and propagating and get straight to the point of the book — growing Florida vegetables.

From cabbage and spinach to squash and peppers and nearly every herb on the planet, the book provides a thorough overview: regions, planting, growing, maintaining, harvesting and using. A sprinkling of recipes adds a nice flavor to the book, too. My favorite: Ugly Carrot Soup.

You’ll also run into the authors’ sense of humor: Under the garlic listing, for example: “If you grow enough garlic, the vampires will leave you alone.” And details you may not have thought of – this under Swiss chard after harvesting the leaves: “You can still eat the roots after you pull the plants out.”

A full-color section in the center of the book contains 48 pages of photographs with even more ideas and explanations. From that section alone, I learned from a photo caption that “sunflowers exude a chemical that poisons other plants around it, so you can use sunflowers as a weed-resistant border near your vegetables but not with them.”

For me, the greatest part of the book is Appendix 1, which provides gardening calendars for the prime sections of Florida: North, Central and South. These important guidelines are left out of many books I’ve read over the years on gardening here in our Zone 9. Twelve pages of calendar are dedicated to Central Florida alone.

I recently got to touch bases with Stibolt by email:

Q: Tell us a little bit about your blog, GreenGardeningMatters.com.

When I moved to Florida in 2004, gardening was totally different from the Mid-Atlantic states, so I started writing “Adventures of a Transplanted Gardener,” but last year after eight years in Florida and with two Florida gardening books under my belt, it was time to graduate from the old adventures to something more general. Green gardening is a broad topic that allows me to cover pretty much anything gardenwise.

Q: How did you and Melissa Contreras get together to write “Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida”?

I met Melissa when I was on the book tour for “Sustainable Gardening for Florida.” She was the events coordinator at Fairchild Tropical Gardens, but she also was involved in urban gardening in Miami with her Urban Oasis organization. So when I decided to tackle the organic gardening book, I knew I needed someone in South Florida. We are five planting zones apart! It worked out very well, since our backgrounds and gardening experiences are so different.

Q: In a photo caption, your book warns folks to “Beware of seedlings for sale at big-box stores,” because they aren’t necessarily stocking wisely for all of Florida. Wow. I’ve gardened for a couple of decades here and never knew that. Comment? (and thank you for that tip!)

Yes, those big-box stores rely on companies with large distribution systems. It seems that Florida is lumped in with Atlanta, and what works there won’t necessarily work in Florida. Brussels sprout seedlings are offered for sale throughout Florida, but they will not work at all in South Florida because there is not enough cold.

Recently I wrote about the long-day onion plants offered for sale (tinyurl.com/longdayonions), when here in North Florida we grow our onions through the winter when the days are short. Those long-day onions might grow, but they would not produce an enlarged bulb before the hot weather. Those long-day onions are good for northerners who are supposed to plant onions just before the last snow and grow them into early summer when the days are long.

What happens when the wrong plants are offered is that the beginning gardeners think that they did something wrong and they give up.

Customer success doesn’t seem to be part of the business plan for the big-box stores. To me that’s a really sad situation. Hopefully, our book can begin to educate the gardeners so they’ll know not to buy these plants, and hey, maybe even a big-box store manager will see our warning and start to pay attention.

Q: Another tip you give: Leave the roots of cabbage and broccoli in place after the initial harvest so new growth will produce a “come-again” crop. Does this work only once? On any other vegetables?

I’m on the eighth or ninth harvest of my broccoli this year. This will work for most any of the mustard family crops. And come-again growth work on lettuces, chards, basil and many others.

You may notice that we grouped the vegetables by botanical family rather than alphabetically like most vegetable books. This helps with the crops rotation, but it’s also part of trying to help gardeners figure some methods like this that may work for the whole family. It also helped in the planting instructions because we only had to write those family-wide instructions once.

Q: We’re into late March already! What veggies or flowers should we plant now as seedlings? Which ones as seeds?

It’s too late to plant tomato seeds, so you’ll need to purchase seedlings and get them into the ground right away so you can get in a harvest before it’s too hot — once it’s 70 degrees through the night, the flowers do not set fruit. The peppers, also in the same family, will grow right through the hot summers. It’s time to start squash and pretty soon it will be time for okra and sweet potatoes, our summer crops. There is a planting and to-do list calendar for North, Central and South Florida.

Q: Anything else to add for our gardeners here in Zone 9?

I will be speaking in Daytona Beach on (Wednesday), so please urge your readers to come to the Florida Native Plant Society meeting.

“Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida,” by Ginny Stibolt and Melissa Contreras, University Press of Florida, 326 pages, $24.95, paperback

Ugly Carrot Soup

From “Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida,” by Ginny Stibolt and Melissa Contreras. Perfect for using up your ugly carrots and other not-so-perfect or end-of-the-season crops. Serves 8 to 10.

1/4 cup of olive oil

1 or 2 medium chopped onions, with their greens

2/3 cup chopped celery

1/4 cup sunflower seeds, shelled

1/4 cup dried barley

1 tablespoon fresh rosemary

2 or 3 garlic cloves, chopped

8 to 12 fat carrots chopped or sliced thickly

6 to 8 cups of water

spaghetti (an inch in diameter when held in a bunch) or 2 lasagna noodles, broken

1/2 to 1 cup of chopped greens (parsley, broccoli or cabbage leaves, wild garlic leaves or pretty much whatever needs harvesting)

1 1/2 cups of nonfat plain yogurt

1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese

finely chopped onion greens, chives and fresh dill leaves for garnish

ground pepper to taste

In a soup pot, heat the olive oil. Over medium heat, brown the onions and their greens, celery, sunflower seeds, barley, rosemary and garlic. Stir frequently. As the onions become translucent, add the carrots, stir for a few minutes and then add the water. Bring the soup to a boil and then simmer for about 25 minutes until the carrots become soft.

Add the pasta and greens. Simmer for another 15 minutes until all the ingredients are soft. Remove from the heat, cool and then run the soup through a blender or food processor until it is mostly smooth.

Stir in the yogurt and Parmesan cheese.

Garnish each bowl with a dollop of yogurt, onion greens, chives, dill and freshly ground pepper to taste. If you add a lot of greens, the orange-yellow color will dull, but the soup will still taste carroty.

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Top 10 gardening tips for a bountiful summer harvest despite the weather

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SPRING is here, (though it may not feel like it) and gardeners and food lovers who want to enjoy a feast of fruit and veg in the summer need to brave the wet and the cold and start work now.

Ian LeGros, Hyde Hall curator, gives us his tips for what to do in the garden in March.

  1. ​Hyde Hall

    Hyde Hall

1. Strawberries: Wimbledon and Pimm’s may seem like a very long way away but believe it or not March is a really crucial time for those who want to enjoy strawberries in the summer. Normally you have to wait a year to get a crop, but by buying ’60 day’ plants that have been kept refrigerated you can get a crop as quickly as, well, 60 days.  After cropping the plants can be left to crorp for another few years.

2. Gardeners who have planned ahead can gather Parsnips, leeks, spring onions, sprouting broccoli and kale are all at their best. And if you fancy something sweet forced Rhubarb is delicious right about now.  New gardeners can start sowing parsnips now and planting rhubarb for 2014.


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3. Apply a nitrogen feed to plums, cherries, cooking apples and pears as they’re hungry feeders. This will help fruit swell this year and encourage flower buds for 2014.

4. Give raspberries, blackberries, loganberries and blackcurrants a treat and mulch with well-rotted farmyard manure or garden compost

5. Plant onions, shallots and garlic sets as well as Jerusalem artichoke tubers. Red onion sets are tricky and best planted at the end of the month.

6. Make sure you have a steady supply of potatoes by laying out both early and second early varieties in a light cool place, like an attic or conservatory, and waiting for them to sprout.  Maincrop potatoes are also best sprouted, but the tubers are gathered in early autumn for storage over winter.

7. Spring is a bit late this year so it’s not quite time to start sowing new vegetables. You can get the earth ready though by digging it well and covering for a couple of weeks with cloches, clear polythene or fleece to warm it up ready for your seeds.

8. If the weather has been wet avoid walking on your soil as you’ll compact it and just create work for yourself later on.  Alternatively by using some planks to work off you can avoid damage.

9. Slugs absolutely love the wet weather we’ve been having and will be poised and ready to much their way through any new seedlings you may plant out as soon as if the weather gets warm enough. There are all sorts of ways to protect your crops, pick the one that works best for you and get it in place now or you’ll be feeding the slugs, not your family.

10. Weeds should start shooting up now and if not tackled, will quickly take over your garden. Little and often is the key to effective weed control so begin now, winkling out dandelions and docks, and hoe off weed seedlings through the summer.

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Gardening tips for beginners

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Gardening is a rewarding hobby that many enthusiasts credit with helping them to peacefully escape from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Though gardening can be both relaxing and rewarding, it’s not as easy as it may seem, and the more time and effort a person devotes to his or her garden the more likely it is to be successful.

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Go wild for flowers this National Gardening Week

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WITH wildflower seed sales soaring, gardeners can learn more about how to sow their own wildflower meadows during National Gardening Week Wildflowers are back in fashion, according to reports on their sales.

In the past year, sales of UK wildflower seeds have increased by 60%, thanks partly to renewed interest fuelled by the stunning wildflower meadows at the Olympic Park in 2012.

The combined elements of eye-catching visual impact, ecological awareness and wildlife value have fuelled sales of wildflower seeds among many of the main seed companies, including Thompson Morgan, Suttons and Mr Fothergill’s.

With this in mind, the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) is playing its part during National Gardening Week (April 15-21) as its gardens across the country host talks, demonstrations and events to get gardeners growing wildflowers.

Young gardeners will be encouraged to get their hands dirty and learn how to sow their own mini-wildflower meadow, perfect for attracting birds, bugs and creepy crawlies of all types.

More experienced gardeners can find out how to support the wildlife in their gardens through a range of talks and interactive workshops on beekeeping, managing meadows and more.

Ian LeGros, curator at RHS Garden Hyde Hall in Essex, explains: “Wildflowers are currently going through a massive boom in popularity and are set to be one of the big trends for amateur gardening in 2013.

“They are easy to plant and maintain, provide much needed habitats for wildlife and are valuable sources of nectar and pollen for bees and other pollinators.

“Encouraging wildlife and pollinators is particularly important in urban areas, so if you’ve a sunny patch of dry ground that won’t support much else in your front garden, it’s time to convert it into a wildflower meadow.”

He offers the following tips to those who want to follow the wildflower fashion: :: Choose seed carefully. Wildflowers are easy to grow but, like all plants, need the right conditions if they are going to thrive. Check your soil type and find a mix that will work for it.

:: Poor soil? Look to perennials. If you have poor soil perennial wildflowers will do very well as there will be fewer grasses for them to compete with. Buy seed mixes that contain ox-eye daisies, yarrow, harebells, birdsfoot trefoil, cowslips, lady’s bedstraw, betony, yellow rattle and others for waving drifts of colour.

:: Go mad with colour. If you have well-cultivated soil, annuals such as cornflowers, corn poppies, corn marigolds and corncockles will do well. Toss in a few barley and wheat seeds for an authentic feel. Annuals are a good choice if you are converting an existing border.

:: Time of sowing a meadow is important. An annual seed mix containing cornflowers and poppies will do better if sown in the autumn, while corn marigolds prefer a spring sowing. If you have sandy or well-drained soils, wildflowers can be sown during the autumn, but if you have wetter, colder soils, you’re better off sowing in the spring to avoid seed rotting off.

:: Prepare your ground. Wildflowers are easy but do take a bit more work than just opening a packet of seeds over the ground. Prepare your soil first, making sure it is weed free and has been well dug or rotovated. If you are growing wildflowers, keep fertility low in most cases, so avoid using manures or fertilisers as this will just give grasses and weeds the advantage they need to crowd out your wildflowers.

:: For full details of the events at RHS Gardens during National Gardening Week, visit www.nationalgardeningweek.org.uk

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Larry’s Look | Gardening tips for the spring

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CHARLOTTE, N.C. — If you’ve ever thought about starting a garden, there’s a simple way to do it.

The Garden Growers is a small company here in the Charlotte area…offering a wide-range of gardening and farming expertise and services to anyone interested in learning how to eat organically and locally.

Their mission is to teach organic, sustainable and low maintenance ways to grow an edible garden.

Organic Growers believes in sustainable and organic gardening practices. They use only natural fertilizers and organic matter such as leaves, compost, manure and beautiful and healthy garden.

To combat insects, they use integrated pest management (IPM) and other organic methods to help grow pesticide-free food. IPM means the insect population is not destroyed in your yard. Instead, specific pest problems are targeted, leaving the beneficial insects needed for pollination, unharmed.

On Larry’s Look the morning, Jason Loseke from The Garden Growers, we got a close-up look at the organic gardening process. 

He demonstrated just how easy it is to grow in your backyard—what you find at the farmer’s market!

For all the details, go to: www.thegardengrowers.com.
 

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Gardening tips at Derrington Village Hall

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GARDENING tips to put a spring in your step are on offer at Derrington Village Hall on Saturday.

Fruit and veg growing lessons, a panel of experts to quiz and an interactive workshop on designing your own garden are just some of the activities at the spring gardening event being hosted by Derrington Way Ahead from 2pm to 4.30pm.

There will also be gardening giveaways and tea and cakes provided by Derrington WI. Admission is free.

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